7 ms·

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? It doesn't

by ezoe 3y ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? It doesn't and it won't happen in any time soon. How could humans with probabilistic LLM which cough up hallucination replace humans without it when the answer to my previous two questions are NO.

theLiminator 3y ago
> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Certainly for a whole host of tasks. > Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? Also true for many tasks too, a programmer who refuses to use these resources for certain types of work will be an order of magnitude slower in many cases and will be replaced by programmers who aren't. LLMs are just beginning to become useful, but there will be a point where they're indispensable, those who refuse to use them will eventually find themselves falling behind. It's will eventually become equivalent to a programmer who refuses to move off punch cards or refuses to use modern version control.
- pydry 3y ago
  We're peak hype cycle for LLMs right now so we have an order of magnitude more ridiculous shit said about them than would otherwise be normal. The trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. They will be useful for a set of tasks but all of the people hyperventilating over this being the new industrial revolution might consider calming down a little. The high priests of capitalism have been blaming lost jobs on automation since forever - largely because this narrative makes a convenient, impersonal scapegoat.
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    I'm curious what the "hype cycle" looked like for the discover of electricity, the invention of the combustion engine, or for the invention of the transistor. Who knows if the LLM paradigm will be more like those moments vs the failed hype of something like the hydrogen fuel cell.
    - pydry 3y ago
      I'm old enough to remember how it worked for the Internet. It was treated as a curiosity for nerds for a long while. The whole time I thought it was completely underrated and would change everything - thats why I decided to get into tech. Then there was a short, sharp "it's going to change everything" hype cycle that lasted no more than a few years followed by a trough of disillusionment that coincided with the recession that was around 2003 or so. I thought almost all parts of the cycle were exaggerated from the part where it was a curiosity for nerds to the "pets.com craze" where "the high street would disappear completely". With LLMs it's very similar but rather than a meaningful shift in technological development underpinning it it's something more like a parlor trick with a few practical applications.
      - ivy137 3y ago
        a parlor trick lol. Here we are seeing statistics applied on abstract terms as human knowledge, how this is something with few practical applications?
        FridgeSeal 3y ago
        Because the results and actual efficiency gains are flaky, inconsistent and mostly limited to boilerplate? GPT and friends are very impressive, yes; if you’re also impressed by your intern blindly copying stack overflow.
        ivy137 3y ago
        Maybe I am a fun of fuzzy logic, but I find gpt less flaky than most people that I read about, I think it will evolve. I feel gpt will even allow us to create new branch of mathematics applied at psychology. I can't understand why you compare it with an intern copy paste, it's simply absurd to compare. Looks just a way of reducing the argument and drawing parallelism where there are none. Yes, some people use it to program, No, not everyone uses it for programming
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
  - xcv123 3y ago
    No this is just getting started. https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/ https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/
- softsound 3y ago
  As someone who somewhat works with AI it's good if your data is good and terrible if it's not, my job is literally to clean up AI failures, and due to bad data or dealing with interpretation a lot can be done with data good or bad. My work helps retrain the model, but sometimes because of bad management we have unclear answers on how to interpret the data and this leads to some coworkers training it wrong and you'll see this linger between projects. Now if the people were better trained the data would be too but oh well. Someone wants to cut costs. I think this kind of issue will always exist no matter the model, you can't really make up data you don't have (I mean you certainly can but it all has to be figured out how to fix it when it does just start guessing poorly) and sometimes there are no answers but bad answers in some edge cases.
- wruza 3y ago
  Text editing and version control solved very specific problems. E.g. the former allows quick iteration and the latter allows to analyze changes and work in parallel. Which problems do programmers have that only AI could help with?
Kiro 3y ago
What? The answer is obviously "yes", especially to your first question. Your whole premise is wrong.
diego_moita 3y ago
> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? You're obviously not aware that "computer" was a profession, a job before becoming a machine, just watch the "Hidden Figures" movie. Have you seen a human computer later?
- beebeepka 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
senectus1 3y ago
If you exchange the word "replace" with "Displace" then it works better i think. Humans with AI wont cause the extinction of humans without it... but there will be a elevation of "class" for those with it.
probably_wrong 3y ago
> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind. Those of us who saw the PC revolution still remember the time when typewriters were an everyday artifact. We also saw how everyone was forced to choose between updating or being left behind - no matter how fast your secretary was, a human with carbon paper is no match for a human that slightly tweaks a template and sends 10 copies to the printer. And a human with a calculator will always be slower than a human with Excel.
- thefz 3y ago
  > Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind. Do a plumber, a baker, a policeman need a computer to do their job? That's right, they don't. So men with computers did not "replace" those without.
  - Knee_Pain 3y ago
    Policemen literally have computers in their patrol vehicles and a lot of police work is computer work. Plumbers need to order stuff online, manage invoices, have an online presence to get and communicate with customers, have digital instruments that might feed into their field laptop. Bakers use digitalized machines and have their recipes down to an almost exact science. They use computers all the time to calibrate stuff.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Police definitely needs all the tech it has, beginning with auto detecting license plates to countless other tech they use.
  - robot_no_421 3y ago
    Even if those people aren't using computers at their job (and I even disagree with that), they still use computers. A baker with a computer and internet access has access to more recipes than a baker without a computer. A baker with a website and an online presence is finding more customers than a baker who only exists in the real world. As a matter of fact, the new boiler my plumber (who has a webpage and I found online, mind you) recently installed has computer chips and circuits. My plumber seems very technically literate and knowledgeable about the tech as well. Police offices are now using AI to catch people. Even before, they were using computers in criminology for DNA samples. So all of the professions you listed use computers all the time for their job. Both directly and indirectly. A baker without internet, a plumber with no computer knowledge, a police office stuck using analog tools are all worse off than their tech savvy counterparts.
mettamage 3y ago
My grandparents can’t fill in their taxes because they don’t know how to use the internet. That’s the only way you can fill in taxes as far as I know (in The Netherlands). They rely on me to do it. Some people don’t have that luxury.
croes 3y ago
The problme isn't if humans get replaced, some will, but that the value of the single human drops. Humans become the expandable operator of the tools that do most of the work.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  if anything the opposite is the case. As tools get more sophisticated and potent the value of human judgement goes up given the increased leverage of tool use. Tools are force multipliers. Humans today are much less expendable, and much more valued, than they ever were historically. (on display in just about every profession, even on battlefields)
  - jprete 3y ago
    A lot of people who are bullish on LLMs and AI are quite clearly excited to get other humans out of the loop. I think movie execs would absolutely love to get the writers and actors out of the picture, ideally not paid a dime for anything going forward.
  - croes 3y ago
    >Humans today are much less expendable, and much more valued These people don't sound valued to me https://www.boredpanda.com/toxic-baby-boomer-advice/ https://www.boredpanda.com/toxic-baby-boomer-advice/
kristianpaul 3y ago
Too soon to answer, but LLM provide advantages, yes
mbernstein 3y ago
Quite easily. Everyone is fixated on LLMs delivering a complete product or providing 100% accurate information. Too much of a focus on hallucinations. First, humans don't deliver 100% accurate information, so let's keep the bar at something reasonable. Secondly, complete products are not necessarily the only value of LLMs. LLMs are pretty solid when it comes to helping break out of some sort of creative block. Think about it this way - when you're trying to creatively solve a hard problem, what is one of the best mechanisms to help? Perspective changes. LLMs are extremely helpful when assisting with perspective changes (driving/helping iterate on different creativity tools like combination, association, etc). I can't get the full article to load for some reason - but so far I seem to see people mostly arguing that LLMs will do the work for us and it will be amazing or subpar, etc - but neglecting, which I assume is the point of the article, that LLMs will be a co-pilot for humans and assist in ways like perspective shifting to find faster/better/more innovative solutions.
nojvek 3y ago
Fundamentally what do we need to survive? Water, food, clothing, a place to call home, dignitary. Replacing is a strong word. There are many people who live Tech agnostic lives. When I leave Seattle and SF, most strangers I talk to haven’t even heard of GPT. This is HN so we’re biased towards specific problems. However access to quality food, water, electricity, internet, shelter, sanitation, opportunity still remains a problem for a large chunk of the population. And LLMs which are fundamentally next prediction algorithms don’t make a huge difference to someone’s survival ability.

by ezoe 3y ago

theLiminator 3y ago

> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Certainly for a whole host of tasks. > Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these? Also true for many tasks too, a programmer who refuses to use these resources for certain types of work will be an order of magnitude slower in many cases and will be replaced by programmers who aren't. LLMs are just beginning to become useful, but there will be a point where they're indispensable, those who refuse to use them will eventually find themselves falling behind. It's will eventually become equivalent to a programmer who refuses to move off punch cards or refuses to use modern version control.

pydry 3y ago
We're peak hype cycle for LLMs right now so we have an order of magnitude more ridiculous shit said about them than would otherwise be normal. The trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. They will be useful for a set of tasks but all of the people hyperventilating over this being the new industrial revolution might consider calming down a little. The high priests of capitalism have been blaming lost jobs on automation since forever - largely because this narrative makes a convenient, impersonal scapegoat.
- theLiminator 3y ago
  I'm curious what the "hype cycle" looked like for the discover of electricity, the invention of the combustion engine, or for the invention of the transistor. Who knows if the LLM paradigm will be more like those moments vs the failed hype of something like the hydrogen fuel cell.
  - pydry 3y ago
    I'm old enough to remember how it worked for the Internet. It was treated as a curiosity for nerds for a long while. The whole time I thought it was completely underrated and would change everything - thats why I decided to get into tech. Then there was a short, sharp "it's going to change everything" hype cycle that lasted no more than a few years followed by a trough of disillusionment that coincided with the recession that was around 2003 or so. I thought almost all parts of the cycle were exaggerated from the part where it was a curiosity for nerds to the "pets.com craze" where "the high street would disappear completely". With LLMs it's very similar but rather than a meaningful shift in technological development underpinning it it's something more like a parlor trick with a few practical applications.
    - ivy137 3y ago
      a parlor trick lol. Here we are seeing statistics applied on abstract terms as human knowledge, how this is something with few practical applications?
      - FridgeSeal 3y ago
        Because the results and actual efficiency gains are flaky, inconsistent and mostly limited to boilerplate? GPT and friends are very impressive, yes; if you’re also impressed by your intern blindly copying stack overflow.
        ivy137 3y ago
        Maybe I am a fun of fuzzy logic, but I find gpt less flaky than most people that I read about, I think it will evolve. I feel gpt will even allow us to create new branch of mathematics applied at psychology. I can't understand why you compare it with an intern copy paste, it's simply absurd to compare. Looks just a way of reducing the argument and drawing parallelism where there are none. Yes, some people use it to program, No, not everyone uses it for programming
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
- xcv123 3y ago
  No this is just getting started. https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/ https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/
softsound 3y ago
As someone who somewhat works with AI it's good if your data is good and terrible if it's not, my job is literally to clean up AI failures, and due to bad data or dealing with interpretation a lot can be done with data good or bad. My work helps retrain the model, but sometimes because of bad management we have unclear answers on how to interpret the data and this leads to some coworkers training it wrong and you'll see this linger between projects. Now if the people were better trained the data would be too but oh well. Someone wants to cut costs. I think this kind of issue will always exist no matter the model, you can't really make up data you don't have (I mean you certainly can but it all has to be figured out how to fix it when it does just start guessing poorly) and sometimes there are no answers but bad answers in some edge cases.
wruza 3y ago
Text editing and version control solved very specific problems. E.g. the former allows quick iteration and the latter allows to analyze changes and work in parallel. Which problems do programmers have that only AI could help with?

Kiro 3y ago

What? The answer is obviously "yes", especially to your first question. Your whole premise is wrong.

diego_moita 3y ago

> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? You're obviously not aware that "computer" was a profession, a job before becoming a machine, just watch the "Hidden Figures" movie. Have you seen a human computer later?

beebeepka 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

senectus1 3y ago

If you exchange the word "replace" with "Displace" then it works better i think. Humans with AI wont cause the extinction of humans without it... but there will be a elevation of "class" for those with it.

probably_wrong 3y ago

> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer? Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind. Those of us who saw the PC revolution still remember the time when typewriters were an everyday artifact. We also saw how everyone was forced to choose between updating or being left behind - no matter how fast your secretary was, a human with carbon paper is no match for a human that slightly tweaks a template and sends 10 copies to the printer. And a human with a calculator will always be slower than a human with Excel.

thefz 3y ago
> Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind. Do a plumber, a baker, a policeman need a computer to do their job? That's right, they don't. So men with computers did not "replace" those without.
- Knee_Pain 3y ago
  Policemen literally have computers in their patrol vehicles and a lot of police work is computer work. Plumbers need to order stuff online, manage invoices, have an online presence to get and communicate with customers, have digital instruments that might feed into their field laptop. Bakers use digitalized machines and have their recipes down to an almost exact science. They use computers all the time to calibrate stuff.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Police definitely needs all the tech it has, beginning with auto detecting license plates to countless other tech they use.
- robot_no_421 3y ago
  Even if those people aren't using computers at their job (and I even disagree with that), they still use computers. A baker with a computer and internet access has access to more recipes than a baker without a computer. A baker with a website and an online presence is finding more customers than a baker who only exists in the real world. As a matter of fact, the new boiler my plumber (who has a webpage and I found online, mind you) recently installed has computer chips and circuits. My plumber seems very technically literate and knowledgeable about the tech as well. Police offices are now using AI to catch people. Even before, they were using computers in criminology for DNA samples. So all of the professions you listed use computers all the time for their job. Both directly and indirectly. A baker without internet, a plumber with no computer knowledge, a police office stuck using analog tools are all worse off than their tech savvy counterparts.

mettamage 3y ago

My grandparents can’t fill in their taxes because they don’t know how to use the internet. That’s the only way you can fill in taxes as far as I know (in The Netherlands). They rely on me to do it. Some people don’t have that luxury.

croes 3y ago

The problme isn't if humans get replaced, some will, but that the value of the single human drops. Humans become the expandable operator of the tools that do most of the work.

Barrin92 3y ago
if anything the opposite is the case. As tools get more sophisticated and potent the value of human judgement goes up given the increased leverage of tool use. Tools are force multipliers. Humans today are much less expendable, and much more valued, than they ever were historically. (on display in just about every profession, even on battlefields)
- jprete 3y ago
  A lot of people who are bullish on LLMs and AI are quite clearly excited to get other humans out of the loop. I think movie execs would absolutely love to get the writers and actors out of the picture, ideally not paid a dime for anything going forward.
- croes 3y ago
  >Humans today are much less expendable, and much more valued These people don't sound valued to me https://www.boredpanda.com/toxic-baby-boomer-advice/ https://www.boredpanda.com/toxic-baby-boomer-advice/

kristianpaul 3y ago

Too soon to answer, but LLM provide advantages, yes

mbernstein 3y ago

Quite easily. Everyone is fixated on LLMs delivering a complete product or providing 100% accurate information. Too much of a focus on hallucinations. First, humans don't deliver 100% accurate information, so let's keep the bar at something reasonable. Secondly, complete products are not necessarily the only value of LLMs. LLMs are pretty solid when it comes to helping break out of some sort of creative block. Think about it this way - when you're trying to creatively solve a hard problem, what is one of the best mechanisms to help? Perspective changes. LLMs are extremely helpful when assisting with perspective changes (driving/helping iterate on different creativity tools like combination, association, etc). I can't get the full article to load for some reason - but so far I seem to see people mostly arguing that LLMs will do the work for us and it will be amazing or subpar, etc - but neglecting, which I assume is the point of the article, that LLMs will be a co-pilot for humans and assist in ways like perspective shifting to find faster/better/more innovative solutions.

nojvek 3y ago

Fundamentally what do we need to survive? Water, food, clothing, a place to call home, dignitary. Replacing is a strong word. There are many people who live Tech agnostic lives. When I leave Seattle and SF, most strangers I talk to haven’t even heard of GPT. This is HN so we’re biased towards specific problems. However access to quality food, water, electricity, internet, shelter, sanitation, opportunity still remains a problem for a large chunk of the population. And LLMs which are fundamentally next prediction algorithms don’t make a huge difference to someone’s survival ability.